Being the world’s most used content management system makes WordPress a natural target for attempted attacks by malicious users.

In April 2013, WordPress installations around the world were subjected to a worldwide brute force attack.

These attacks were caused by computer networks infected with malware and programmed to attack other computers (botnets).

How To Protect Your WordPress Site From A Brute-Force Attack

What Are Brute-Force Attacks?

A brute-force attack is a technique used to break an encryption or authentication system by trying all possibilities.

(Source: Chinese University Of Hong Kong)

One of the many ways hackers use to try and break into a WordPress site is by trying to guess the site admin’s login username and password. This is achieved with scripts and tools that automatically tries to guess hundreds of login possibilities in minutes.

If you’re using easy-to-guess login details, your site could be an easy target for hacking attempts.

This is called a “brute-force” login attack.

Botnets – What Are They?

A botnet is a number of Internet-connected computers communicating with other similar machines in an effort to complete repetitive tasks and objectives. This can be as mundane as keeping control of an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel, or it could be used to send spam email or participate in distributed denial-of-service attacks. The word botnet is a combination of the words robot and network.

(Source: Wikipedia/botnet)

”Botnets” are networks of computers that have been compromised and infected with malicious scripts or code, which can then be controlled remotely as a group, typically without the computer owners even being aware of this.

Botnets are normally used used to blast mass spam emails from the infected computers of unsuspecting users.

Below is a screenshot taken from an online security monitoring site showing the locations of the command centers of ZeuS – a botnet that has been actively infecting computer networks all around the world since 2009 …

(The Zeus botnet has been actively infecting computer networks all around the globe since 2009. Screenshot: SecureList.com)

These ongoing botnet attacks are well organized and highly distributed. Over 90,000 IP addresses were identified by a number of webhosting companies just in the initial attack, when the web was flooded with millions of attempts to force their way into WordPress users admin areas. The worldwide brute force attacks then continued, with over 30,000 WordPress sites being hacked each day.

Coverage of this brute-force botnet attack was reported by all the major webhosting companiesand leading technology publications, such as Forbes, TechNews Daily, Tech Crunch, BBC News, PC Magazine, and even on the official website of the US Department of Homeland Security …

(WordPress often comes under attack by hackers, due to its popularity)

Does This Mean We Shouldn’t Use WordPress Anymore?

No. In fact, there are lots of good reasons why you should use WordPress if you are concerned about website security.

We explain what makes WordPress a very secure platform for websites in this article: Are Open Source Platforms Like WordPress Secure?

It’s important to note that, in the case of the brute force botnet attack described above, no specific WordPress vulnerability was being exploited (the same script was also targeting sites built using other CMS platforms like Joomla).

Mike Little, the co-founder of WordPress, made this comment about the brute force attacks:

It is a “simple” script that attempts to login using the admin login and a generated password. So if your password is too short or based on dictionary words it will be guessed and then the script can login legitimately and do whatever it wants including installing scripts (as plugins) or editing files. The attack tries to guess your password, if it succeeds, the most secure site in the world is wide open because they have your password.

(MikeLittle.org)

How To Protect Your WordPress Website From Brute-Force Attacks – Ten Security Measures

You may think that the information in your site is of little value to hackers, but the reality is that all websites are valuable to a malicious user.

If hackers can access and gain any form of control of your website or blog, your web site can then be employed to attack other valued sites.

Additional undesirable impacts of having your site hacked include being blacklisted by Google, having spammy links promoting things like gambling, discounted fashion, etc. inserted into your content, malicious redirects to phishing sites, data exfiltration (stealing information or Personal Identifiable Information from your web applications), and many other nasties.

The reality is that malicious bots are probably trying to break into your site as you are reading this page right now. Whether they will achieve this will depend on how difficult you have made it for them to continue persisting until they work out how to break in, or are forced to decide to look for a less secure target.

How Much Information About Your WordPress Site Are You Broadcasting To Hackers?

Do you own a WordPress site? If so, visit Hackertarget.com and run your website through their WordPress security check …

(Hackertarget – WordPress Security Scan Screenshot image: https://hackertarget.com/wordpress-security-scan)

You will see that the check returns a number of results and details about your WordPress installation …

(Hackertarget – WP security check results. Source: Hackertarget.com)

It should be obvious after using this tool that if you can access all of this information, hackers can too.

(Screenshot image: Blog Defender)

Being able to see which version of WordPress you are using, which plugins and themes you have installed, and which files have been uploaded to certain directories in your site can all be valuable information to hackers, as this informs them about any potential security vulnerabilities, especially where the owners haven’t updated their sites.

If your site or blog is powered by WordPress and you are not preventive steps to toughen up your site, it’s practically guaranteed that, at some point in time, someone will attempt to hack your site, because these brute-force attacks are systematically hitting WordPress sites worldwide!

Typically, whenever a website or blog gets compromised, website owners will find themselves “locked out” of their own site, or notice that their files have been vandalized or even entirely wiped out. Often, compromised sites will become infected with malicious scripts or viruses without the owner’s knowledge or awareness.

To help avoid the heartache (and significant loss of valuable business data) of having your web site being hacked into, we have listed below 10 essential and effective security measures that will help to prevent your WordPress site from brute force botnet attacks.

Note: A few of the recommended steps listed below need some technical skills to modify core WordPress and/or server files. If you are not technical-minded, or don’t want to mess around with file code, then ask your web host or a professional WordPress technical provider for help.

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Security Measure #1 – Contact Your Hosting Provider

Get in touch with your hosting provider and ask them exactly what measures they have put in place to help prevent your site from being attacked, and what they are doing to ensure that your files and data are being backed up.

It’s important to check that your hosting provider regularly backs up your sites and that, if disaster strikes, you can quickly and easily get back your files.

Security Measure #2 – Perform Regular WordPress Backups And Keep Your Website Regularly Updated

You should never rely on your web host for your site backups. Instead, learn how to maintain and manage your WordPress site or pay someone to get this done for you and maintain a habit of religiously performing a complete WordPress site maintenance routine on a frequent basis (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly, etc …)

A full WordPress maintenance routine ensures that:

• All unnecessary files and data are deleted,
• All WordPress files and data are free of errors, optimized and backed up,
• All WordPress software, plugins and themes are up-to-date,
• etc …

A proper WP maintenance routine looks like this …

(Maintaining your WP web site frequently backed up and updated is vitally important for WordPress security. Image source: WPTrainMe.com)

Again, we cannot stress enough how vitally important it is to maintain your WP website or blog frequently backed up and up-to-date. WordPress site maintenance is not hard to do or time-consuming, but it must be done to ensure the security of your website or blog. If you don’t want to learn how to do WordPress site maintenance yourself, pay someone to do it but make sure this gets done. Backing up your website is the next most important thing you should do after making sure that you still have a pulse!

If you don’t want to back up your site manually, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can use. Learn about a WordPress backup plugin that can fully automate your backup process here: Backup, Clone And Keep Your WordPress Websites Protected With Backup Creator Plugin For WordPress

Security Measure #3 – Make Sure That Your Username Is Not “Admin”

The large scale brute-force botnet attack on WordPress sites was mostly attempting to compromise website admin panels and gain access to sites by exploiting WordPress installations with “admin” as the user name.

For security purposes, don’t install sites with the username admin. This is the first thing hackers will test. If your site’s username is “admin”, change this immediately.

We have created a simple tutorial that shows you how to change your username here: Changing Your Admin User Name In WordPress

Security Measure #4 – Your Password

A “brute force” attack occurs when malicious software continually tries to guess the right combination of characters in a username and password that will give them entry to your website.

Unless you put some measure in place to block the brute force attack (see further below for a couple of effective suggestions for doing this), the “bot” will just persist in attacking your site until it eventually gets access.

Weak passwords, therefore, make very easy targets for botnets. Make sure that you change your password combination to a string containing at least eight or nine characters long, with upper and lowercase letters, combined with “special” characters (e.g. %, #, *, etc).

You can use a password software tool like Roboform to generate strong login passwords …

(You can use a password management software tool like Roboform to generate unguessable passwords)

We have created a simple tutorial on how to change your admin password here: How To Change Passwords

Security Measure #5 – Prevent Access To The wp-config.php File

The wp-config.php file allows WordPress to communicate with the database to store and retrieve data and is used to define advanced options for WordPress.

(wp-config.php)

If hackers break into your website, they will look for the wp-config.php file, because this file contains your database information, security keys, etc. Getting access to this information would allow a hacker to change anything in your database, create a user account, upload files and take control of your site.

In order to protect your WordPress site from being attacked and even being used as part of a bot net, therefore, prevent your wp-config.php file from being accessed. This requires knowing how to edit database information, move files around in your server and changing access permissions.

Security Measure #6 – Rename Or Delete Unnecessary Installation Files

Rename or delete your install.php, upgrade.php and readme.html files.

You can remove these files after installation, as they are unnecessary. If you don’t want to delete these files, then just rename them.

Security Measure #7 – Keep Your WordPress CMS, Plugins & Themes Up-To-Date

Hackers look for vulnerabilities they can exploit in outdated versions of WordPress, including outdated versions of themes and plugins.

Make sure to keep your files, themes, plugins, etc. up-to-date.

Security Measure #8 – Disable Your WordPress Theme Editor

WordPress installations come with a built-in editor that allows site administrators to edit theme and plugin files inside the dashboard.

In WordPress, you can access your WordPress Theme Editor by selecting Appearance > Editor from the main menu …

(The WordPress theme editor can be accessed using the WordPress admin menu)

The WordPress theme editor allows anyone accessing your site’s admin area to view and modify your theme templates, or cause mayhem on your site.

To prevent people from accessing your WordPress Theme editor, you will need to disable it. This can be done by editing your wp-config.php file.

Security Measure #9 – Prevent Access To The WordPress Uploads Folder

The WordPress “uploads” folder stores all the media that gets uploaded to your website.

Normally, this folder is visible to all users online. All a person needs to do to see all of the contents in the “uploads” directory is navigate to your directory using a web browser …

(WordPress uploads directory)

If any directories in your website have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers or malicious users, this can threaten the security of your website.

Protecting your directories will prevent online users from accessing your ‘uploads’ folder and other important directories. This can be done using plugins, setting file permissions, adding a blank index.php file (this is literally an empty file called “index.php”) to your uploads directory, and so on. Again, it’s best to ask for assistance from someone who knows what they are doing if you are unsure about what to do.

Security Measure #10 – WordPress Security Plugins

There are a number of WordPress security plugins available that specifically address most security issues faced by WordPress site owners, such as preventing hackers from accessing vital areas of your site, protecting your site from malicious scripts, preventing injections of code into files, etc.

Most WordPress plugins address some but not all areas of WordPress security. One security plugin that does a comprehensive job of scanning, fixing and preventing potential issues that could lead to hackers accessing your files and damaging your site is SecureScanPro.

(SecureScanPro – complete security plugin for WordPress)

SecureScanPro is easy to install and easy to use, and fixes most of the security issues that WordPress users need to address.

Another security plugin you may want to look at using is BlogDefender.

Blog Defender

(Blog Defender)

Blog Defender is a package of WordPress security video tutorials, WordPress plugins and tools, plus WordPress security documentation in PDF and DOC formats.

BlogDefender scans you website for security holes …

And then shows you how to quickly fix these …

If you don’t want to purchase a security plugin like SecureScanPro or BlogDefender, you can use various free plugins, such as Limit Login Attempts …

WordPress is a secure web platform, but neglecting simple maintenance tasks like keeping your WordPress core files, WordPress plugins and themes up-to-date, tightening file and data protection and taking other necessary precautions can expose your site to attacks by hackers and bots.

No matter what kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, web security is something you cannot ignore.

As a final reminder of the importance of website security, below is the advice given by an expert on website security to all WordPress users following the worldwide brute-force attacks on WordPress in April 2013 …

Owners of websites based on WordPress CMS must improve at least basic security settings and implement best practices such as the use of robust passwords and the accurate management of “admin” accounts.

Pierluigi Paganini, Chief Information Security Officer, Security Affairs

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As you can see, WordPress security is of the utmost importance if you run a WordPress site. Hopefully, the information in this article has shown you what to do to keep your WordPress site protected from brute force attacks. If you need any further help or assistance with WordPress security, please consult a professional WordPress security specialist, or search for a WordPress technical provider in our WordPress Services Directory.

We also recommend subscribing to WPCompendium.org to receive notifications when we publish new tutorials on WordPress security and reviews of new security plugins and solutions.

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